# Susan Gold

Susan Gold is a B2B marketing strategist who helps professional-services firms clarify whom they serve, build a practical marketing plan, and make their positioning easier for clients and referral partners to understand.

- Profile: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/creators/susan-gold/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/susanmgold
- LinkedIn followers: 5,336
- Topics: b2b-marketing, positioning
- Based on 13 dated posts, latest 2026-09-22

## Summary

Susan Gold is most useful for helping B2B professional-services firms clarify whom they serve and improve referral language.

- Best for: This fits a B2B professional-services firm wanting sharper positioning and more referrals from its network.
- Not for: This does not fit a consumer brand seeking sponsored posts, audience demographics, or measurable reach.
- Check first: Confirm paid work scope and ask for audience and engagement data.

### Takeaways

- Saying you can work with anyone makes it hard for the right client to find you.
- A networking problem is usually a language problem.
- Write a roughly 40-word introduction email referral partners can copy.

## Main ideas

- **Saying you can work with anyone is why the right client cannot find you**: Gold's most repeated argument is that a vague buyer description removes the hook a prospect needs. "We're agnostic, we can work with anyone," gives the brain nowhere to go, so nobody recognizes themselves in the firm's materials. Gold treats a specific buyer statement — industry, size, and situation — as what makes a firm findable, and argues that naming a buyer feels like shrinking the business when it does the opposite.
- **A networking problem is usually a language problem**: Gold separates the effort of networking from the wording a network needs to act. People cannot refer what they cannot articulate, and most professionals are surprisingly hard to describe, even to people who like them and want to help. The bottleneck is not goodwill: the person willing to make an introduction does not know how to describe the firm, so the introduction never happens.
- **Networking works only when it is intentional**: Gold argues that the room and the amount of activity are rarely the problem; what’s missing is a strategy behind the activity. That means clarity about the ideal client, which strategic partners can actually reach them, and how to hold conversations that convert. Without those three, activity produces busyness rather than clients.
- **Fix the strategy underneath the tactics before spending on the tactics**: Gold targets mid-market firms that arrive with a complete list of individually sound marketing needs. Without a strategic foundation, each item consumes budget and produces little. The list is not the problem; it may be filling the space where strategy should be.
- **What firms buy is clarity and an outside view, not marketing services**: Gold's framing of the purchase is that a firm is not buying a menu of services; it is buying someone to identify the problem. Inside familiarity obscures what prospects see: you know too much, assume too much and miss what is obvious to an outsider. They describe the strategist's output as a short roadmap prioritized by impact, not a long report that sits on a shelf.
- **Pick the ideal client from your own client economics, not from a template**: Gold argues that the buyer profile should come from analysis of the firm's actual client history — who pays well for value, who carries high margins and who is a strong fit — rather than guesswork or a generic worksheet. They say this is one of the five things firms buy when they hire a strategist.
- **B2B is a different discipline from B2C, and providers often do not know what they are missing**: Gold treats B2B expertise as a qualification in its own right, not just a label. Its distinguishing features are complex sales processes, multiple decision-makers and relationship-based selling. Providers without B2B experience, Gold warns, do not know what they do not know and end up applying consumer tactics to a buying process they have not worked in.

## Work to read

- [Who is your Ideal Client?](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/susanmgold_who-is-your-ideal-client-is-it-anybody-activity-7498027688746676224-gVYd)
- [If you've been networking for more than a year with no real results](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/susanmgold_if-youve-been-networking-for-more-than-a-activity-7453072757648470016-NKBy)
- [Writing the introduction email for your referral partners](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/susanmgold_after-40-years-in-b2b-marketing-heres-activity-7454884696997400577-NyOE)
- [When a profitable B2B firm finally hires a marketing strategist](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/susanmgold_when-a-profitable-b2b-firm-finally-hires-activity-7432794111889272832-aHEw)
- [A senior advisor at a mid-market firm sent me his list of marketing needs](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/susanmgold_a-senior-advisor-at-a-mid-market-firm-sent-activity-7480999289293295616-o7Z6)

## Partnerships

Susan Gold's posts describe a client-services practice, not sponsorships, sponsored-content placements, affiliate arrangements, or media-partner formats. A firm hires them to sharpen its positioning, build a prioritized marketing plan, and make its introduction and referral materials easier to use. The closest thing to a distribution arrangement is referral networking: Gold writes about equipping referral partners with a short, copy-ready introduction so they can describe the firm accurately. That is a recommendation a client acts on, not a partnership format a brand can buy. For a campaign budget, ask whether sponsored placements, co-marketing, or referral arrangements are available, and get the scope, deliverables, and pricing in writing.

## Alternatives

- Tom McMakin: Consider Tom McMakin when the firm already has live relationships but referrals stall in the conversation itself. The post describes a training proposal sent to an account lead at a private-equity-backed healthcare consulting firm, followed by a second call where McMakin set the proposal aside and asked how the quarter had gone and what would be hardest to pull off. That question surfaced the firm's actual constraint—getting practice professionals to write thought leadership—and made the next offer natural. For a firm whose partners know the right people but keep talking about their own services, this questioning approach targets the moment the referral is usually lost.
- Jason Vana: Choose Jason Vana when the problem is larger than referrals and the firm wants to rebuild its market position. The reviewed case post describes mapping ideal customers, narrowing to one industry, creating standard products, rewriting messaging, launching an SEO website, building a client acquisition system, producing case studies, and listing the company in industry directories, with print and digital ads continuing afterward. A second post reduces brand strategy to one fill-in sentence—"We are the only {category} that provides {unique value} by {differentiated method} for {ideal customer label} unlike {competitor label}"—and notes that the template was used across 145 brand strategies. This is the stronger fit when the firm needs a new position and the demand-generation machinery to carry it, not just sharper language for existing referral partners.
- Kerrie Luginbill: Consider Kerrie Luginbill when the firm should first test whether "we are not getting referrals" is really "our service is hard to buy." One post argues that buyers now diagnose problems with AI, research options, compare approaches, and ask trusted contacts who they know, which makes vague, heavily customized services that need three sales calls before the buyer understands the purchase especially costly. The goal, in that post, is to design and package a service so a buyer can recognize their problem, the solution, how it works, and what they will get. A second post offers a qualification lens: professional-services firms split between those that help clients avoid risk and those that help clients build value, and the two can look identical on paper while having very different appetites for investing in their own growth. This fits a firm willing to examine the offer itself rather than only its description and introduction email.

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AI-assisted summary of public posts. Audience demographics are not available. Engagement appears only where we checked recent posts. Method: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/methodology/